Bloggers

Hile Rutledge, a leadership consultant who heads Otto Kroeger Associates, writes in The Washington Post’s On Successblog about the different ways in which different personality types are creative. This is of great interest to me; one of Eric Liu’s and my goals in Imagination Firstis to get people to maximize their personal imaginative potential, and Rutledge’s theories are thought-provoking in this regard. Some people, he says, are creative by “intuition,” defined as “a process of gathering data that emphasizes imagination, possibilities, and abstraction.” These are people who naturally see things as if they could be otherwise. And when they get together, share ideas, and combine them to form new ones, “external intuition” happens. Intuition also refers to the phenomenon by which notions seem to suddenly come to us out of the blue. On the other hand, Rutledge explains, some other people are creative by “sensing,” defined as “a process of gathering information that emphasizes sensate data, specific facts, and here-and-now details.” Focusing only on what’s tangible and possible, such people solve problems by working with what they have at the moment. Sensing can also mean being able to draw on one’s storehouse of solid knowledge and memory for application in the present. In the end, Rutledge highlights the importance of knowing one one’s own creative nature—a critical step, it seems to me, if one is to try to become more imaginative, more creative. So what kind of personality do you have? What kind of imaginer or creator are you?

Children are given problems to work on that no one believes they can solve—certainly not the young researcher who designed the study to test children’s responses to setbacks and failure. But when, instead of expressing anger or frustration or simply giving up, one boy “pulled his chair up, rubbed his hands together, smacked his lips, and said, ‘I love a challenge!’” and a second boy remarked, “You know, I was hoping this would be informative!,” that young researcher—once she picked herself up off the floor—found herself increasingly interested in what she came to call these boys’ “growth mindset.” Continue reading →